


The soul as a metaphysical object

by CelestialIguana



Category: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Genre: Addie LaRue/Original Female Character(s), If You Squint - Freeform, Luc surrenders, Luc/Henry Strauss, Multi, absolute disregard for proper chess etiquette, but very minor, emotional incompetency, spoilers obviously it is post epilogue, the antagonist is just communication, to the mortifying ordeal of being known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27088906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialIguana/pseuds/CelestialIguana
Summary: Henry feels lonely, and Addie and Luc begin the long process of reconciliation. For some reason, it includes a game of chess.
Relationships: Addie LaRue/Henry Strauss, Addie LaRue/Luc
Comments: 10
Kudos: 65





	1. Chapter 1

Adeline is over 300 years old, yet certain subliminal parts of her remain, against all odds, human. She still rises with the sun, arranges her infinity around the movement of cosmic bodies, still looks up to what few stars are possible to see in the city and wonders at their cold light. It is a human thing, this marvel. She is aware of this, of course. Meaning she knowingly lied when she told Luc she was no longer human. She can never be anything but. She is, however, just the tiniest bit  _ more, _ in the way only she can be. 

Luc knows humans. Humans are his customers, his product, and his profit. What sort of salesman would he be if he did not understand them, inside and out, back to front, every shadow-filled crevice they try so desperately to hide from prying eyes? He has had centuries to study their mannerisms and habits and centuries to be disappointed in the deals they offer. So many lack the knowledge of what a soul is truly worth. So yes, Luc knows humans, which puts him at an advantage in this game Adeline plays, because he knows humans, and Adeline only thinks she knows him. 

Another thing that is human, so terribly, importantly human. Error. Flaws. An event ushering in an unforeseen and perhaps unwanted conclusion. Adeline is still human after 300 years of the world doing its absolute best to expel her, and so she errs.

It is a little mistake. Not one Luc would normally notice, but this is Adeline, and every word that comes from her lips has a quality unlike anything he has heard before. She moves with the grace of immortality and yet speaks as though time were leaking through her fingers. Luc supposes he has made it so. And so he notices. 

_ I will be yours, as long as you want me by your side.  _

She says she is no longer human, and yet she speaks of  _ want  _ as only a human can, as if  _ want  _ is some ephemeral thing, as fleeting as the pale sunlight that lingers on the edge of summer. How could she know that want, for Luc, for whatever he is, is not seasonal. It is not the tide, keeping schedule with the moon. It is always and endless, and sometimes he believes the word want does not cover what amounts to something more akin to hunger, to need.

Whatever Luc is, whatever elements make up the shadows broiling beneath this gossamer skin he wears, he is nine parts hunger and one part boredom, and the latter only serves to feed the former. 

Still, Luc understands her dilemma. He is not entirely cold. Somewhere among the darkness that convalesces into a mock heart flickers emotions (as he knows are reflected in his gaze, for there exists no other reason Adeline might bring herself to make such prolonged eye-contact). He understands that after the salve that Henry Strauss brought her, Adeline would be desperate to keep it alive, so that her world in flames might at least offer some warmth to the one who filled it so prettily for those brief months. 

It is easy, as one’s love lays dying and a heart too soon found begins to break, to misinterpret a human face as human, especially when Luc has chosen his so expertly. He does not blame her in mistaking her definition of want as his.

So Adeline, although she does not know it yet, will lose. 

She cannot win. Neither will Luc, of course, as Adeline’s descent into hopelessness will surely make his own life miserable, but it is possible for two to lose a game when the rules have been set so haphazardly. 

_ As long as you want me by your side.  _

Luc will never stop wanting her, and Adeline will never stop making herself unwanted. Even Henry Strauss, as he reaps the rewards of telling the invisible girl’s story to the world, will feel a dull ache when he remembers. Because that had been part of the deal;  _ let him remember me,  _ she had said, and so Strauss will, and he will never be content. Every part of the world he visits, every town he sees, every photo he takes will be less, simply for the fact that they do not have  _ her.  _

Adeline has single handedly created a situation in which a devil, a human, and a pseudo-immortal find themselves trapped, miserable, and entirely too stubborn to have a productive conversation. 

If Luc was not in the process of losing his mind, he might almost be impressed.

***

There are good days, and there are bad days, as is to be expected. There are days when New York is too loud, too chaotic, and time moves so quickly Henry almost feels the minutes rustle his hair as they fly past. There are days when the elevator seems to take an eternity and he wonders whether he has become ancient at some indeterminable point between floors five and six. 

And then there are the days when, as he walks through Central Park, his nose pressed into his grey scarf, he catches a glimpse of the book that has become the strings tying his fragile heart together, the name that has become his center of gravity, and everything feels a little more right. 

Cairo was too bright, London too dreary, and Los Angeles too sprawling, a concrete spider stretched under the palm trees. The only one that had felt real was, of course, the one that felt too much like her, but an unfamiliar her, a her he had only known through stories, and therefore Paris and all its little villages was scratched off the list. 

Back to New York, then. Where the Addie he knew lives in the pages and minds of enough people to put him on the Bestsellers list, and he can see an echo of her in the buildings and the streets and the museums. New York is less of a city and more of an outline, an enhancement of the negative space she used to fill.

Bea’s nearly finished her thesis. It’s all she talks about now, this muse splashed like droplets of paint across the canvas of history. Henry thinks it’s wonderful, even though she might never remember meeting her subject, all those second-first-introductions.

Robbie is harder. He always has been, very much in character for an actor. So full of light, but a harsh light. Blinding, if you look too long. Burning, if it comes too close. That’s why it hurts so much to see the fog over his eyes. So Henry tries not to look too hard and probably ends up looking like an asshole, instead. 

Better an asshole than a manipulative, lying devil, twisting promises into currency and love into… competition? 

_ As long as you want me by your side. _

He can’t ever forget those words, no more than he can forget the girl who said them, although the world seems to insist on him doing so. 

But she had asked, had sold her soul for the second time (her living soul and her undead one now both belonged to him, Henry’s dark benefactor; surely there is a conflict of interest in there somewhere) for him to remember her, and so he will.

Addie gave him his life at the cost of hers, and Henry is not sure his life is worth so much. To Luc, of course, it is nothing. Which is not quite fair, something Henry is fairly sure deals are meant to be. 

It had been raining when the shadow whom he calls Luc, thanks to Addie, had appeared from nothing, and it is raining again now. One moment Henry had been alone, and then he was not. He is rarely alone anymore. Robbie and Bea offer happy company, and his curse that cost a life provides any amount of manufactured love, if he were to ever accept it. He never will, though, and he sometimes asks whether it was worth the price.

For Addie, the answer is always yes. 

The rain tends to remind him of Luc, but not only because of that first meeting. Rain is the great cleanser, the revealer of secrets hidden beneath dust, and Luc is nothing if not an old, dusty, heaping pile of secrets.

Draped in a beautiful skin, of course. But dusty and old nonetheless.

There had been other nights after he was given the power to be anyone except himself. Nights when Luc was only visible because of the indentation he left between the raindrops, nights when the mist encroached upon the street-lamps everywhere but for a stretch of shadow in the rough shape of a man. A man who is not a man, but that’s a secret for Henry to keep. So that when he strolls down Broadway, the shadow at his side, he’s the only one who knows what he walks with.

It’s raining now, but Luc doesn’t appear.

Of course he wouldn’t. He has his prize. Why would he visit his bait, alone in a room of photos and memories?

(There is some part of Henry that feels left behind. Tossed out. Used up. He has served his purpose. He has forced Addie back into the hands of her demon and lost his own in the process, lost the two people who saw him without that fog over their eyes.)

He should feel happy. Addie has given him his life; he should love it as she wanted him to. He had her for a time and was hers for longer, the only one (not anymore) who had. Addie belongs to the world now, as she should, as she perhaps always had. The world is bruised with her marks.

  
And maybe, Henry is coming to realize that her memory and the world isn’t enough. Not when it’s a greying memory and a world without her. 

At the cost of her immortal soul, Addie has bought his dissatisfaction. 

Will she forgive him?

The quiet room illuminates under a tumultuous flash of lightning, and between the dying of the light and the roar of thunder, Henry remembers. 

It had just been an idea, the faintest outline of plan, back when he had been running low on hope and high on righteous anger. The green-eyed darkness hadn’t been Luc, then. It had just been Him. In moments of weakness, it was his shadow.

And so Henry, drop-out PhD student and bookshop employee, went to ground in the only way he knew how. He read. Countless hours, words unintelligible streams of history and theory, physics and witchcraft, theses on God, on the lack of God, on the old gods. And he came to the conclusion that this conglomeration of darkness made tangible, given the face of royalty, must be a demon. 

And to think he had been studying theology. 

Books on the old gods are few and far between, and generally unreliable. But Henry found a pattern and he grabbed onto it, and that was the name. The green-eyed demon had to have a name, and he would find it, and it would give him the power to reverse his curse that he had not intended to be a curse. 

And then Addie called him Luc, and Henry began to doubt that the demon had anything more than a nickname given by a young French girl. For all intents and purposes, his shadow  _ was  _ Luc. 

Yet Addie had also provided his face, and Luc had admitted himself that it was changeable. Who’s to say there isn’t a truer name hidden somewhere? Here at last is Henry’s chance. His chance to free Addie from a game she cannot win because she and her partner are dancing the same steps, mirrored.

Maybe, some part of him wonders, she does love him. Love born out of necessity is love nonetheless, and three hundred years is a bond he can’t even come close to matching.

Henry knows all this, but he also knows, with the intensity of one so recently in love, that his bond was separate but equal,  _ is  _ equal, to that which she shares with their demon. 

Luc has a name like he has a form, hidden under that sharp, cold facade. A form that reaches into a person’s chest and rips out their soul, a form that is the reason humanity has always had a primordial fear of the dark and what lives in it. It must exist (Henry has to believe it exists, or he doesn’t think he’ll be able to continue).

Bea had begged for an ending. Henry intends to make one.


	2. Chapter 2

There had been other fires before New Orleans, of course. None that were quite as memorable or burned quite as hot, but fires nonetheless. A small one in Florence, the result of a candle thrown in rage and a tapestry Luc only allowed to ignite in hopes of its ashes soothing its creator. (It had been a blank tapestry. Adeline could not make the paint stick through any force of will, no matter how thickly she applied the oils, and Luc’s ill-timed visit had not been appreciated.)

There had been a gentle one in the Swiss mountains, flickering gently against the harsh wind. Luc hadn’t let it go out (because Adeline had tried so damn hard to get it started and the winters were bitterly cold here—beautiful, but cold).

A dropped lantern in London, a weak candle glimpsed between gauzy curtains, the golden flames of the sunset on the ocean. All fires, in their own right, yet Adeline seems to only remember the one. A lover once burned, twice shy, ever cautious of the sparks. The ashes of New Orleans still fall too closely in their footsteps for Adeline to enjoy their warmth.

He had offered to bend the deal. He had offered her a home, his  _ love,  _ and she refused to believe his sincerity simply because he was not  _ human,  _ even though she herself was not, either. 

But that is neither here nor there. Here is Adeline, in all her subtle, muted glory, here is a controlled flame in its glass cage, and here is Luc, losing. 

“The pawn can only move one space.” Adeline knocks his hand off the offending piece (white, because he prefers the first move) and slides it back a square. “I refuse to accept that you don’t know the rules.”

“Of course I know the rules,” he says. “It is this pawn’s first move.”

Adeline glares. It is not the glare she used to direct towards him. It is older, sharper, heavier, somehow. There are times when Luc finds himself missing the naive heat of her untested fury, and there are times when he finds the intense clarity of her eyes addictive.

It is not the pawn’s first move. Both of them know it. Adeline seems to also know that  _ he  _ knows it, which is disappointing. 

Luc lets his hand fall from the illegal pawn and instead rests his chin in his palms, elbows on the chess board. 

“Adeline,” he says, and feels a bitter satisfaction as she meets his eyes, even if she does so out of irritation. “Have you ever played chess for a soul?” His elbow nudges Adeline’s queen away from his king, out of a checkmate she doesn’t even realize he’s in.

“You know I haven’t.” She is annoyed, but at least she is  _ something,  _ which is more than she has been in the past weeks. 

(There are good nights, and there are bad nights, although Luc is not used to keeping time in such a rigid manner. There are nights when she is away for hours and returns radiant, sometimes with a new book, and he knows she has been to visit Henry. There are nights when she accepts his invitation and they walk tirelessly through the city, arm-in-arm, and the stars creep from their hiding places behind the clouds. 

And then there are nights when the hunger claws its way up from that place in his chest that he really does try to hide. More often than not, those nights end in shattered glass and broken voices.)

“Would you like to?”

A sigh. Adeline spreads her hands as if she is helpless. As if. “I have nothing to bargain. You have made sure of that.”

He grins, and he knows by the way her eyes flicker to meet his that she still feels some scrap of emotion for him, albeit deeply buried.

“Yes,  _ your _ soul is off the table. I was asking, my love, if you’d like to play for  _ mine.” _

A heartbeat of silence. Or perhaps an hour. Luc does not know the feel of time, and he cannot tear his gaze from her face to perceive any movement in the stars. She is very still. 

“You cannot have one,” she breathes at last. “You are nothing but shadow and darkness, held together by the souls of better men.”

“You did not even know what one looked like until I showed you. How can you possibly assume that I lack a soul?”

What is a soul? It is light made tangible, prismatic and golden and beautiful, even if its owner hadn’t been. 

“I am not a monster, Luc. I do not hunger for them. What use would your soul be to me?”

What is a soul but memories?

“You claim to not understand. Let me help you.” He waits, but she remains silent, utterly still but for her fingers tapping the black stone bishop against the table. “For every piece you take, I will give you a story. I have countless.”

Her head twitches to the side. It appears innocent, but her eyes are calculating. She has had centuries to learn him, after all. But this is not a trick. 

“And if you capture a piece?” she asks, carefully, testing the waters. Too often he has filled them with sharks. “What would you have me surrender–” she spits the word as if it's poison “–that I have not already?”

_ You, in your entirety. Your heart, without its walls, without its fear.  _

“The same,” he says instead, as she would never accept his truth as such. “An exchange of memories.”

And in the process, maybe she would understand.

“You know all of mine,” Adeline protests. “You have had a hand in most of them.”

  
  
Luc molds his chosen face into a smirk. “You are not the only recipient of my attention. You overestimate my interest.”

She scoffs. But she cannot prove him wrong (he is, of course) because it was she who first discredited his love. 

“The winner,” he continues with a grand gesture to the board, which resets itself, white on his side and black on hers, “may have anything it is in the other’s power to give.”

(The words are purposefully vague. What can truly be given, and by what power? But Adeline knows him better than anyone else on this earth, despite her rejection, and it is this grey area that gives her the confidence to agree. If she loses, she can wiggle free, and he would let her. If she wins, there exists countless possibilities to her advantage. Luc has crafted this game for her, and he cannot yet admit to himself why.)

When Adeline smiles, it is the smile of one who knows something their opponent does not, sharp and deadly. Luc falls a little more in love and forgets to remind himself that it's meant to be impossible. 

He moves a pawn two squares forward. In this manner does a game of pawns and queens become an entanglement of stories and memory, and two immortals sit down to play chess. 

***

The white rook is the first to fall, and so Luc begins his first story of the night. It is not a happy one.

It begins with a boy named Will and a white stone house at the edge of the world.

(Have you ever seen the White Cliffs of Dover, he asks Adeline. She shakes her head. Well, he sighs, you do yourself a disservice. Miles of rolling hills drop in great white sheets into the ocean, the gateway to the old world. You must visit sometime.)

The boy named Will has a last name, but it is not one Luc ever learns. He is fair-haired and fair-skinned, and Luc almost thinks him a statue hewn from the stone of the cliffs he plays along when he first sees him. The boy is fearless. The cliffs, hundreds of feet above the sea, are of no concern. His eyes are always on the stars. 

Luc is drawn away for some reason or another. America is hobbling along on its newborn legs, and he has little time for boys with chalk dust on their cheeks and their heads in the clouds. When he returns, out of a passing curiosity, the boy is no longer a boy, and the white stone house is greying. 

Will has learned caution. Yet it is not enough to stop him from kneeling in the dust, inches from the edge of those ghostly cliffs, and praying to whichever gods might be listening as the sun sinks below the sea. 

It is not until the first stars emerge that Luc makes his presence known. 

Will, to his credit, doesn’t flinch. He sets his back to the open sky and asks, in a quiet, unassuming voice, “What can you see?”

It takes Luc by surprise. It has been centuries since a question caught him off guard. “The ocean,” he responds, after a moment. “The sky. The cliffs.”

Will nods impatiently. “Can you see the stars?” he asks.

“Of course. Everyone can.”

“But can you see them  _ all?” _

“There are infinites upon infinities of stars,” Luc says. “You cannot see them all lest you risk going blind.”

“That is my wish, then.” Will finally steps away from the edge of the cliff and holds out his hand. “I wish to see all of them without going blind.”

Luc blinks. “You do not yet know the price of your wish.”

“It is my soul, yes? I have heard the stories. I know what you are,  _ demon.” _ For a heartbeat, Will’s eyes flash with a sharper light, but then his grimace smooths into the gentle quirk of a smile he normally wears, and the moment is gone. 

Luc grasps his hand. It’s unnecessary; he doesn’t need to seal the deal with physical contact, but humans have always been creatures of touch. The deal is struck. Will blinks, gasps, and Luc fades back into the shadows. He won’t return for four years.

When he does, the voice that calls to him in broken desperation does not resemble in any way the steady tone Will used to have. It is wavering, shattered, and fallen into disrepair. 

Will, it seems, has gone quite mad. The limitless expanse of stars has proven too much for the human mind. 

“Have you seen enough?” Luc asks the man whose gaze remains captured in the heavens.

His eyes were always bright, but now they are radiant, resplendent. “No,” Will whispers. “No, I haven’t. There is so much more than anyone can imagine.” He doesn’t look at Luc when he speaks. The stars prove too magnetic in their gravity. “I try to tell them, you know, but none of them listen. None of them understand. And how can they? They are blind, all of them.”

“Yet you are not.”   
  
“No,” he says. “I am the only one who can see.”

And as Luc reaches forward to take his soul, for Will’s time has run out, the fearless boy smiles grimly as if he knows a secret that Luc does not and takes two steps backward. The first takes him out of Luc’s grasp and closer to the cliff’s end than he’s ever been. The second brings him over the edge of the world.

The sea, on a smooth day like this, reflects an almost perfect image of the night sky.

***

“That was a terrible story,” Adeline says. “You drove a man to madness and death. What was the point of it all?”

“The point,” Luc says, “is that sometimes I regret what I’ve done. The pain my deals bring. And the point, Adeline, is that you’ve taken my rook, and now it is my turn.”


	3. Chapter 3

Maybe Addie picks this story because she wants to hurt him. Maybe it’s a test of the limits of his emotions. Maybe it’s simply because he has taken her knight and she can’t think of anything else. 

Regardless, she begins to speak.

It is 1915. The new world is not the bright, shiny thing she had imagined. In fact, Chicago is all charcoal and concrete and smoke on the surface. But scratch off the paper-thin film of ash and you find _noise_ , music, dancing, laughter, light. The city at night moves with a wild fervor. Addie is bewitched. 

Love number four is a girl with dark hair and grey eyes that dance under the lights of the bar as she pours Addie her drink. Her fingers are musician’s fingers. She is all angles and uncut edges, and her smile is more a jagged slice across her face than a warm welcome.

She is not someone Addie would have picked as a bartender, but somehow it works.

(A bartender, Adeline? Luc interrupts. Classy. Adde rolls her eyes. As opposed to a demon with a stolen face? He concedes the point.) 

“How long have you been in Chicago, newcomer?” the bartender asks as she pours Addie’s drink. There’s a hint of an accent curling the edges of her words that Addie can’t place, lilting and playful.

“Only a few weeks,” she says. She suspects the bartender might be more inclined to stay and talk if she thinks Addie needs tips on the new city. Really, Addie just wants to hear her talk. Her voice harmonizes with the music and thrum of the crowd. Addie feels alive.

Addie asks her name at some point during the night. It’s Mei, but that’s about the only thing she catches over the noise. That’s ok, though. Entire conversations can be had in looks, gestures, kisses exchanged in an empty room behind the bar.

“Do you play?” Addie asks in the empty space between kisses, running her fingers along the delicate lines of Mei’s hand. 

“I used to,” she says. “I don’t anymore. Not enough money in music, you know.”

Addie wants to protest that there isn’t much money in bartending either, but Mei’s lips provide a much more compelling argument, and the discussion is tossed to the side.

Time passes more quickly than it ought to when she’s lost in the warmth of another body pressed against hers, and all too soon the girl covering for Mei raps sharply against the door of their hiding spot. 

“I’m not getting paid for this,” she snaps.

Mei pulls away and smiles, apologetic. 

“Wait for me?” she asks. “My shift ends in half an hour.”

Sometimes Addie feels as though her life is one made solely of beginnings and endings, stacked one atop the other like pages of a book, the middle discarded to make room for eternity. Every conversation is simultaneously the first and the last she will have with the person on the other end of the line. Addie can wait–she can wait for so much longer than Mei can ever imagine. But Mei will not wait for her.

“As long as you remember,” Addie manages, and where before the music had been loud enough to drown out the sound of Mei’s voice, now she can hear every beat of her heart, steadily counting out the seconds it will take Mei to walk out of the shadowed crevice, turn the corner, step behind the bar, and forget. _One… two… three… four…_ and at some point between the fourth and the fifth beat the silvery hem of Mei’s skirt flutters around the corner, and the faded wooden door snaps shut with an air of finality. Somewhere an indeterminable distance away, a glass breaks. It’s unrelated, of course, and Addie knows all that talk about causation and correlation, but when she looks down at her own fingers, some part of her half expects to see hairline fractures running through the fine bones.

If a girl no one remembers shatters, did she ever exist?

She imagines herself crumbling to broken shards behind a random bar in Chicago in 1915 and is almost surprised Luc doesn’t appear to capitalize on her moment of weakness. He must be busy inspiring misery and heartbreak elsewhere.

The bar is busier when she sits down again in the same seat as before, and the warm lights feel colder, mocking. She has to wait a few minutes for Mei to notice the new customer, but when she does, she slides over, grinning.

And for a moment, Addie hopes. She hopes the smile is one of recognition, of shared vices, a conspirator’s smile. She hopes that maybe–just maybe–the curse has decided to cut her a break after two hundred years of beginnings and endings glued back-to-front. And then Mei, grey eyes alight, opens her mouth.

“How long have you been in Chicago, newcomer?”

Some part of Addie expects an explosion, a violent outpouring of rage and sadness, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because no one would remember it once she’d left. She wants to press her hands into the lacquered wood of the bar and burn her shape into it. She wants to remind the world that she is _here,_ Addie, undiminished, but the emotions never come. The wave cresting in her chest just settles. All her cracked pieces shift, file down their edges. Still there, but dulled. 

She plasters something that only at the most basic of levels might be called a smile across her lips. “Longer than you’d think.”

It’s not the right answer. Not if she wanted a night of grey eyes and delicate hands on her waist and around her neck. Not if she wanted Mei to take her by the shoulders and press her against the brick wall under the wavering pools of yellow light streaming from half-shuttered windows. Not if she wanted to lose herself in another’s life, another’s beginning, and forget for a moment. Everyone else will, in the end. 

Those things are for someone else. Someone who will have their middle etched in ink across their pages, pushing the end and the beginning farther and farther apart with every touch, every kiss. 

Mei laughs politely and turns her back to take an order. When she turns around again, a customer she cannot remember raises a glass in her direction and disappears into the masses of people on the dance floor like a ghost. 

Two weeks later, for some unknown reason, Mei hands in her resignation and drags her old violin case out from darkness. 

*** 

“And what was the point of _that_ story?” Luc asks.

“I don’t know,” Addie says. “That I am not entirely broken. Or that, maybe, I have no need to be fixed. That I have not surrendered, and I never will.”

Luc raises an eyebrow. “But you are losing the game.”

“Shut up, and make your move,” Addie grumbles, but it takes effort to hide her smile.

***

Henry has at last come to pay tribute to his gods. It is September 4, it is raining, and it is long past time to face the music. The apartment is unlocked. He supposes there isn’t much to fear for a demon and a woman no one can remember.

Addie and Luc live in an apartment whose only point of interest is its incredible normalcy. The outside is about what one would expect from a relatively expensive apartment, yet the interior is so uniquely _Addie_ it takes Henry’s breath away. He hadn’t looked to find her in some grey, dusty, backwater hovel littered with the skulls of Luc’s past conquests of course, but the wall-to-wall bookshelves and soft lighting still surprise him. Henry doesn’t know much about Luc, it’s true–but he knows the demon doesn’t read _nearly_ as much as the quantity of books lining the walls would imply.

Yet the apartment is Addie’s as much as the opulent candelabra would make it Luc’s. She has shifted reality. She thinks no one remembers her, yet she is a force of nature, her presence seared into the walls and people throughout history. She is a study in negative space, in what she leaves in her wake. 

Henry thought they might be fighting. He feared he would find them fucking. Addie and Luc are doing neither of those things when he enters the dimly lit room. They appear to be playing what seems to have been a very long game of chess. An empty champagne bottle sits on the table beside Addie’s neat rows of white pieces.

He doesn’t know it, but each captive is a story. 

Luc looks up as he enters, perplexed. It’s a strange look on him. With no small measure of concern, Henry realizes he has a small catalogue of Luc Emotions, and he might even have favorites. If he _were_ to have favorites–not that he does, of course–perplexion might be at the top of the list. It’s viciously pleasing to see the demon off-kilter. The low notes of Addie’s voice stutter to a stop as she too looks around for the cause of Luc’s surprise. 

“Henry?” Addie jerks halfway out of her seat, one hand on the chair and one on the edge of the chessboard. “What are you doing here?”

And there’s a script for this, Henry practiced so many times in front of his home that feels less like home and more like a memory. The thing is, the script flutters from his mind the moment he sees her, the moment she speaks, the moment Luc levels that piercing gaze onto him. It’s an attack more than a glance. Henry doesn’t know how he manages it, but somehow it’s more bearable than Addie’s concerned half-smile and he directs his words to Luc alone. “I want to ask a favor.”

“I am not in the business of favors.” Luc sounds exactly as he had that night, a lifetime ago, rain in his eyelashes. Blink, and a year has passed. 

“Then I just want to ask.”

Addie thinks she knows Luc. And maybe she does, but Henry doesn’t. He has not had three centuries to hate, love, fuck, fight the demon sitting before them so casually, legs crossed at the ankles, turning a black knight between his long fingers. So maybe Addie can play games, but Henry can’t.

“I am in the middle of something.” Luc dismisses him with a wave of his hand. “Come back later.”

  
Henry’s skin prickles. “How much do you remember? You’ve spent, what, hundreds of years on earth? Thousands? How many years, how many _people_ can you truly remember?”

“I said–”

“How old are you?”

“We are busy–”

“What is your _name?”_

This, finally, shuts him up. The knight falls the few centimeters from his fingers to the table with a little clack. A quiet laugh. Addie.

And this was the plan, you see. Names have power. They have history. They have memories, thousands of years of stories building behind them, a tidal wave of emotion. Perhaps Henry didn’t believe in magic before, but before is so long ago. Before is pre-Addie, pre-Luc, pre-the world and everyone in it seeing him as Not-Henry. 

In a basement there was a book. Dusty, of course. Faded. Barely legible. But this book, through some twist of fate, occupied the basement of a woman intent on order, and order dislikes mystery. The book made it onto the infinity of the Internet to be found by one Henry Strauss on page three of his Google Search results for _stupid fucking demon magic_ (he’d been looking a while, at that point, and gotten slightly distracted by the multitudes of interpretations his phrasing allowed) and eventually into his hands. 

“Lost,” Luc says at last. “Forgotten. Erased. I forget which.”

His name is none of those things. Not any longer. 

And then Henry breathes a word, or rather a word tears from his lips on ragged wings of shadow and smoke, edged with centuries of pain and hunger and above all _loneliness,_ the likes of which makes Henry’s knees weak. He does not know the language. He does not need to, to understand the truth of it in Luc’s eyes.

What is a soul but memories and a name?

He does not like to admit it, but there is a certain satisfaction in having the demon’s entire, unrelenting focus solely on him, if only for a moment. He thought speaking the name would feel like power, like control. It doesn’t. Rather, it feels like a puzzle piece, snapping into place at last. 

Luc is silent, his eyes unseeing. Henry does not think that, if opened, they would see this time, this place. Addie jerks her chin towards the chessboard and winks. With purposeful, cautious motions, she nudges her pawn two squares ahead and traps his king in the corner of the board. Henry does not think that was a legal move. 

And just like that, the moment is over. The shadows in Luc’s gaze diminish to only the normal amount creeping around the edges, and his glazed look sharpens to irritation.

“Strauss,” he hisses, moving to stand. “I will rip your tongue from your irritating head–”

Henry pales a little as Luc draws himself to his full height, eyes burning, because he’s gone off script. The name was meant to command compliance, or at least generosity, but it seems it has only angered, and when he tries to form the alien syllables again, his mouth refuses to move. The word has slipped from his mind like oil on water.

“You will finish this game,” Addie interjects cooly, pushing him back into his seat with a firm hand on his shoulder. And Luc lets her. “I believe it was your turn.”

There’s a dark leather couch pushed against the one wall not occupied with books. She stands, grabs Henry’s hand, and drags him towards it. 

“The name–” Henry starts, trying to make some explanation out of chaos. “I thought it would control him.”

  
  
“I don’t think it works like that,” Addie says, smiling softly. She isn’t surprised that he’s there. “It’s an old magic, naming. I got the feeling that you’ve just returned something that he lost a long, long time ago.”

“I wanted to help you, Addie.” There’s already the sinking feeling of failure in his chest. “I fear that he’s dangerous. That he’ll do something irreparable, something worse than what he has already done.”

Steel glints in her eyes. “Yes,” she says. “He is dangerous. But he is predictable, and we’re going to work something out.” Her breath is warm against his ear. “Thanks to you, he has just lost.”

This close, he can count every single one of her freckles. Luc could have lost his left sock and Henry wouldn’t have registered what was happening.

“Addie.” She’s already stepping away, back to her game. “Addie, wait–”

The rest of his sentence is lost as he threads a hand around her neck and presses a soft kiss against her lips. It’s hesitant, new. Unfamiliar, but it’s Addie, who has never felt like a stranger even as a thief in his bookshop, and so some part of this always feels like coming home. She melts against him and the kiss begins to take on a bolder flavor, until–

“Adeline, my love. You have bested me.” Luc’s voice cuts through the fog in Henry’s brain and he stumbles back, knocking his legs against the couch. “What is your demand?”

Addie meets Henry’s eyes and sees something there that gives her the confidence to speak. And as she does, Henry realizes the truth of this whole endeavor. It was never a rescue mission. Addie never needed saving (some part of Henry always knew that). But Henry did. Henry was floating through life in monochrome and his two sparks of color were here, in this room, outlining the terms of a new deal that somehow now included _him._ And fuck, Henry must be more Machiavellian than he knew, because some part of him had always wanted it to end up this way.

Luc was Addie’s before he was Henry’s, but Hell if Henry doesn’t get some claim in this story. 

Addie is warm against his side and Luc still sits below, hands tucked beneath his chin, sharply grinning as the weight of immortality settles around Henry’s shoulders. He had come for an ending. This is starting to resemble something quite the opposite.

Blink, and infinity emerges. 

***

This is not how it ends. Three immortals are not any less dysfunctional than two. That is not, unfortunately, how it works. 

There is still fire, blazing hot, leaving trails of ashes through the years. There is still hesitancy in Henry’s touch and dagger-like caution in Adeline’s eyes, and Luc is ever wary of the weak, soft thing huddled in his chest that might be a heart. 

Adeline is right. He does not know love. But he is learning, and Luc is nothing if not a model student of humanity.

Adeline is right much of the time, although Luc winces to admit it. She was right when she cocked her head to the side one night and wondered whether he, immortal demon of the night, might actually be lonely, despite all the vice and sin and general misery he frequently spread. And she was right when she grinned knowingly and commented, in the most casual of manners, that Henry’s hair looked particularly striking in one style versus some other one. Henry’s hair has become something of a distraction of late. 

There are more chess games, of course. But chess with three is difficult, so sometimes they play cards.

Luc cheats blatantly and with pleasure. Adeline counts cards under her breath. Henry just guesses and finds that his luck has a tendency to hold true. Between one moment and the next, a green-eyed shadow, a boy of many faces, and a forgotten girl forge a delicate peace. 

This is not how it ends, in a warmly lit apartment with a crackling fireplace and teetering bookshelves covered in notebooks detailing Adeline’s (and Luc’s) life. There is an eternity ahead of them, stretching out from this room. Souls are balanced, deals equalized. From the stars to which Adeline looks, from the books Henry sells, from the world through which these two ghosts walk, one forgotten and one imagined, blows a vague sense of apprehension. Collectively, the world inhales. 

This, they realize, is how it begins.

**Author's Note:**

> i loved this book so much and, upon finishing it, spent a solid few hours waiting for new content to fall into my lap. as none ever did, i wrote my own, and i hope it does some level of justice to the original, unforgettable Addie.


End file.
